The Dirty Life.On Farming, Food, and Love

by Kristin Kimball

  In early April the maples budded, turning the sugar bush a hazy red. The sap becomes acrid after budding, so that was the end of sugar season. We’d made fifty gallons of syrup for the members, enough for all of us to enjoy a truly local source of sweetness. Instead of wishing for cold nights, we began looking forward to warmth, to greens. In the cellar of the farmhouse, the selection of roots Rob gave us at the beginning of winter had thinned to a few rubbery carrots, potatoes, and onions, and there were still weeks to go before the ground would be warm enough to send forth the first tonic greens. For dinner I searched the kitchen, found nothing of interest except a piece of bacon that we’d smoked last time we’d slaughtered a pig. No bread in the house, only a half bag of store-bought rice. “Slim pickings,” I told Mark. “Not even you could make a decent meal of this.” He walked outside with the shotgun and I heard a single blast, and then he came back up the driveway with four limp pigeons.

  I held one, still warm and supple. I guess the ubiquity of the pigeon in the city had made me blind to its beauty. If they were rare, I realized, we’d paint their portraits and praise their coloring, the slate feathers with a lavender cast, the flash of rainbow at the neck. When I was a city person you couldn’t have paid me to touch a pigeon, let alone eat one, but with my newfound understanding of the work it takes to raise animals for meat, I was grateful that, in this case, nature had done the raising for us. Moreover, I knew what these pigeons had been eating, and it wasn’t garbage or the stale crumbs out of some creepy old lady’s scrap bag. I’d watched them stuff themselves all winter on the very expensive organic corn and wheat we were feeding the pigs and chickens. They were almost too fat to fly, and the flock had grown so big they blotted out whole sections of the barn roof when they landed. They nested in the cupola of the east barn, safe from the cats, who watched from below with twitchy tails.

  Mark showed me how to pluck the feathers from the breast, pin the tail feathers under one foot, stick two fingers through the skin under the breastbone, and pull. The breast came away from the body with a little sucking sound, exposing the entrails. We picked out the hearts and livers and put them in a bowl. Mark cleaned the feathers from the legs and then cut them from the bodies, which we skinned so we wouldn’t have to pluck them. Heads, entrails, and wings went to the cats, who were circling eagerly.

  Inside, we boned and rinsed the meaty breasts. There were eight pieces, each one the size of a walnut and dark red. I put a pot of rice on to boil and plucked some stray feathers from the legs, and cut off the feet. The legs, the tiny hearts, the backs, the livers, a slice of onion, half a carrot, and a sprig of dry thyme were covered with water and set on the stove to simmer into stock. I caramelized a large skillet of sliced onion while Mark wrapped each breast in a paper-thin piece of bacon. The breasts went under the broiler, the bacon melting into them as they cooked. I made a dark roux, loosened it with pigeon stock, added the chopped giblets, salt and pepper, a palmful of dried sage, a few crushed juniper berries gleaned from the trees behind the barn, and a splash each of bourbon and maple syrup. The meal came together like a great thrift-store outfit: elegant and outré all at the same time. Mark heaped our plates with rice, then a layer of caramelized onion, then four breasts each, and a generous spoonful of the sauce, which was dark brown and glossy. The breasts were about as far from chicken as you can get and still be eating fowl: densely textured, the color of beef, and full of wild game flavor. The effect, on the whole, was a plate to celebrate the end of sugaring, paired to the season like other people pair their courses to wine. The sweet dash of syrup and the smoky bacon evoked the wood-fired evaporator, and the bourbon celebrated the passing of winter, the arrival of spring.

  * * *

  A farm is a manipulative creature. There is no such thing as finished. Work comes in a stream and has no end. There are only the things that must be done now and things that can be done later. The threat the farm has got on you, the one that keeps you running from can until can’t, is this: do it now, or some living thing will wilt or suffer or die. It’s blackmail, really.

  We scrambled for a week to catch up with work we’d put off during sugaring. When the weekend came, we still had to slaughter a steer. We were at the very edge of burning out and had decided that, after the steer was slaughtered and hung, we’d take half a day off, catch the ferry to Vermont, and have lunch. I let myself imagine sitting down and being served by someone else, a voluptuous thought. If we were finished by eleven, we could be back in time for evening milking.

  Mark and I drove the beef herd up from pasture as soon as it was light enough to see, into a temporary paddock we’d built with electric fence. Our bull snuffed along its perimeter, sniffed the air, trumpeted. He was a massive brindled Highland named Rupert, with sleepy eyes and horns as thick as small trees at the base. It was raining steadily, and it had been raining all night. As the herd of thirty milled, our slapped-up paddock quickly turned to mud. Mark had gone to the house to get the gun, and I stood watch in my dripping rain gear and boots. One of the cows, a twitchy, reactive individual named Parker, was coming into heat. She was half Highland, half Dutch Belted. Somehow, she’d gotten a load of neurotic genes from both sides of her pedigree, and she could jump like a horse. When we moved the herd, the rest of the cattle would amble along calmly, while Parker would buck and kick and run full speed, sometimes going headlong into the fence. One morning shortly after she’d arrived, she was missing half her tail, a fine spray of blood still coming from the stump when she twitched it over her back. I found the brushy end of it in the grass. The only theory we could come up with was that one of her neighbors had stepped on it while she was sleeping, and, feeling herself caught, she’d panicked. So it was this neurotic cow with a stub-ended half tail who was coming into heat in our flimsy, muddy paddock, and that was not good. Rupert nosed her from behind, his lip curled back in the half-pornographic, half-comical flehmen response, pushing cows and calves out of his way. Parker was not yet at the phase called standing heat, when she would happily accept the bull’s advances. Instead, she darted from one end of the paddock to the other, moaning, trailing pheromones behind her. The look in her eye was even nuttier than usual, a lurid glow.

  I decided to go to the barn for a load of hay, hoping a snack would calm everyone down. Halfway there, I heard a cracking sound followed by a chorus of bawling. The corner post—a two-by-two stake of oak—had snapped, and a section of electric fence lay popping and sparking on the wet ground. Parker was at the gap, Rupert behind her. She considered the situation for a moment, and then, because she was Parker, she jumped. Rupert followed, lifting his heavy body through the air on stumpy legs, and two older cows and their calves came next, pulled through behind Rupert by their herd instinct. One of the calves snagged the popping fence with a hind leg, and the plastic line stretched taut and snapped, so even that minor barrier was gone, and the herd flowed freely into unconfined space. For a few seconds, they did not know what to do with their freedom, and I thought I might be able to haze them back through the gap into the sagging paddock and hold them there until Mark returned, but they regained their volition, became a river of hair and horns, and flowed down the driveway toward the road.

  We almost had them at the house. Mark came out with the gun as they were thundering toward him. They eyed him and banked right, onto the front lawn. Now they were loosely boxed on three sides by a sturdy pasture fence, the house, and a stream. The pasture fence had a gate in it, and it was open, so all we had to do was funnel them toward it. We were both thinking of a story that had circulated that spring, of a herd that had gotten loose in Westport, the lakeside town to our south. Those cattle were loose for days, wreaking havoc on yards and flower gardens, getting steadily more freaked out and less manageable, until the owner finally called in a hunter, who gunned them down. It was a total loss, the cattle so tattered, all they could do was bury them. They were Highland cattle, too.

  So we pressed gently, trying to cover the escape route around
the side of the house, letting the leaders get a look at the good grass in the pasture. They mooed and milled, unsure, and then good old, amiable Rupert stepped through the gate, followed by Parker and a few cows and their calves. Then the whole herd pressed toward the gate, and Mark and I smiled at each other over their backs. The cattle were calmly fanning out on the pasture and we were almost there when Parker lit the fuse of anarchy. She bucked and kicked her way along the fence, stirring up the others. She was soon followed by a group of galloping cows. If the situation weren’t so serious, it would have been comical. They looked like a group of thick-middled matrons on a Tijuana bender. There were still five steers bunched up on our side of the gate, bottlenecked, and they couldn’t push through before the instinct to follow the herd overwhelmed them and they ran after the cows—outside the fence, of course, and toward the road.

  Mark and I had a breathless consultation and decided that he should go with the cattle in the pasture. They were used to following his voice when he moved them to fresh pasture, so they might come to him, which would draw the loose steers back toward the barn. I was on plan B, trying to outflank the steers, get between them and the road, turn them, and drive them back along the fence and through the gate. There was no time to deliberate. I grabbed a big stick and ran. The steers got muddled in the stream and the trees and lost sight of the cows for a while, which gave me time to get around them and stake a position a few yards from the fence. Then they saw the cows again, rounding the corner of the pasture, and they barreled toward me.

  I had learned some things by then about how to handle cattle, how a herd moves and why. To make yourself intimidating to them, I’d read, you must appear as large as possible and you must look at the animals directly, straight on with both eyes, as a predator would. You must be utterly confident that they will obey you, and under no circumstances should you show any doubt or fear. It is permissible to yell “WHOA” in a big, low voice, but shrieking would not be good. This is what I was thinking as the steers ran toward me, the biggest one in the lead, flanked by the rest in a tight arrow formation, and so I was standing firm and confident, feet planted wide, arms and stick outstretched, yelling “WHOA” in that big, low voice when the lead steer lowered his head and hit me.

  It was the first time in my farm life that my experience as a high school cheerleader helped me. The steer hit me just below the hips, and as he lifted his head and tossed me in the air, I tucked my chin and piked. I believe I pulled a half gainer, because I landed sitting, slightly stunned but completely unhurt. The other steers stopped, staring. From the ground, in the sudden stillness, I could hear Mark calling the herd: “Come on, come on, Boss! Come on.” The steers heard it, too, and so did the herd inside the fence, and, miraculously, they obeyed. I dusted myself off and followed them back across the ditch to the open gate, where the steers eagerly rejoined the herd.

  We spent hours rebuilding the paddock, pounding new corner posts into the wet ground, constructing a laneway out of electric fence, and shuttling the herd through it. We managed to get the milking done and the horses fed before we stumbled to bed, but the steer we were meant to slaughter that day was spared for another week, and our restaurant lunch was a dead fantasy, gone as the day.

  It was always something. Our baby turkeys arrived, and a murderous raccoon learned to jimmy the door to their brooder. Then a pig went off its feed and stayed prostrate in the pigloo, covered in diamond-shaped spots. That was erysipelas, a disease that wasn’t supposed to occur in our region but had been carried in by those turkey poults, which were shipped from the Midwest. Set those urgent needs against our puny human ones—like laundry, like dusting the furniture, like planning your upcoming wedding—and there was no contest. But if you are not careful, a farm can coerce you into thinking that you don’t even have time to cook the very food you grow. There were weeks that spring when Mark and I would end our days so late and so exhausted we’d drive to town for a bag of chips and a pizza, one with a flabby crust and insipid sauce. I could live with dirty clothes, I was avoiding the wedding plans anyway, and, to be honest, I’d never been much of a duster of furniture, but if I wasn’t going to get to eat our food, there was no point in going on. We had a come-to-Jesus meeting and agreed on that point, and from then on, we made it a priority to cook at least one good meal a day for ourselves, usually at midday. We also instituted and enforced a no-farming-on-Sundays rule. There were still chores and milking in the morning and evening, but the hours in between were set aside for human use, for being a couple.

  Some Sundays I was desperate to get away from the farm and do something easy and familiar. My old pleasures were scarce. There were no cafés in town, no bookstores, no interesting little bars to discover. In the city, I’d averaged two movies a week. Here, the nearest movie theater was almost an hour away, stuck at the end of a mall next to a greasy food court, and the repertoire was a cycle of bad horror, bad high school comedy, and a children’s movie. Still, every few Sundays, I’d get so hungry for entertainment I’d scrape the manure from my boots, force Mark into the car, and speed north. Mark loathes driving on principle, and he’d arrange his face into a faux tolerant expression and answer my questions with monosyllables to emphasize his sacrifice, but as soon as we were seated in the theater and the previews came on, he’d go slack-jawed, totally absorbed, no matter how terrible the fare. I realized that, unlike the rest of us, he had developed no immunity to a moving image. His parents didn’t own a TV, and he hadn’t seen much, filmwise, after E.T. You could prop him in front of the popcorn commercial and set it on a loop and he’d be riveted. It felt like a kind of defilement. I was the one who finally tired of the movies, which left me feeling empty on the long drive home.

  The last old habit to fall away was shopping. I could feel the need to shop building up in me during the week, like an itch. I’m not talking about shopping for clothes, or shoes, or any of the other recreational kinds of shopping people generally do. I mean only the oddly comforting experience of flowing past shiny new merchandise, the everyday exchange of money for goods. In the city, most of the landscape is made up of objects for sale, and it’s nearly impossible to leave your apartment without buying something—a newspaper, a cup of coffee, a bright bunch of Korean market flowers. When I went for days without buying anything, without setting eyes on commerce, without even starting the car to burn up some gas, I felt an achy withdrawal. The only shopping options within ten miles of the farm were a grocery store and a hardware store, and on Sundays I’d visit the former and wheel a cart around the aisles, bathed in fluorescent light and Muzak. More and more often, though, I couldn’t come up with anything we really needed, not a thing I really wanted, and the cart would remain empty until checkout, where I’d buy a copy of People and the thick, familiar pillow of the Sunday New York Times. More and more often I was happy to stay on the farm for our Sundays, walk the pastures with Mark, and fall back on our trusty old triumvirate of bed, stove, table.

  We were trying to hammer out this big, awkward thing, bring it from theory into being. This idea we’d grabbed hold of—to create a farm that provided a whole diet to some as-yet-unknown number of annual subscribers, and meanwhile to revive the soul of this old piece of land—was either audacious or stupid, depending on your relationship to risk. It required building a wildly complex farm all at once, investing in multiple types of infrastructure. Mark’s vegetable-growing experience was extensive, but our animal husbandry skills ran from thin to nonexistent. We were new to draft horses, knew nothing about horse-drawn machines, and had boxed ourselves into depending on them. As far as we knew, there was no precedent for this whole-diet model. We did not know how to price it, or if we could sell it. We had nothing to fall back on, had spent all our savings, the numbers shaved down so fine we could keep the balance in our heads. By the time the ground began to warm, it was somewhere in the mid–two figures. The farm we were working toward was only a figment, and it was a long shot, but we were both falling in love with it, i
n the way that parents love a baby even before it’s born. I was the newcomer, the know-nothing, but I had never cared so much about anything in my life.

  I was in love with the work, too, despite its overabundance. The world had always seemed disturbingly chaotic to me, my choices too bewildering. I was fundamentally happier, I found, with my focus on the ground. For the first time, I could clearly see the connection between my actions and their consequences. I knew why I was doing what I was doing, and I believed in it. I felt the gap between who I thought I was and how I behaved begin to close, growing slowly closer to authentic. I felt my body changing to accommodate what I was asking of it. I could lift the harness onto Sam’s back without asphyxiating myself. I could carry two full five-gallon buckets with ease, tottering down the aisle of the barn like a Chinese peasant. I had always been attracted to the empty, sparkly grab bag of instant gratification, and I was beginning to learn something about the peace you can find inside an infinite challenge.

  But why, oh, why, does passion always spawn conflict? As the farm began to take form, Mark and I argued fiercely over everything. We discovered that we had different desires, different fears, different visions for the farm. We were both way too stubborn. We lost whole precious daylight hours fighting over how to build a pig fence or whether the horses should spend the night inside or out. “But farming is my art,” he would say finally, when we were both thoroughly frustrated and close to tears. That seemed ridiculously pretentious to me at first. How much further from art could we be, sweating and wallowing in the dirt like this? Later, after I’d been on many different farms and met many different farmers, I had to concede this point. A farm is a form of expression, a physical manifestation of the inner life of its farmers. The farm will reveal who you are, whether you like it or not. That’s art. As a trump card, though, it was still junk. If this farm was art, then it was going to have to be a collaboration between equals.